Testing everything

[Arith]

Since the voltage is all over the place and I want the Turbo feature; what is a reasonable time to just test a system on stock settings using prime95?

I don't have any games, the only thing I play with is photoshop and its plugins which are 64 bit multithreaded complex Fourier style deconvolution routines processing pics 130MB in size.

GA 970A UD3
crucial 1600 Mhz CAS 8  eight GB DDR3
Sata3 2TB HDD WD Caviar
Nvidea Geforce 520GT 2GB DDR3
600W 40A Corsiar
Zalman PCNS 10X Performa cooler
FX 8120 3.2GHz

[absic]

Hi there,

I have to say that in general I don't bother testing any system I build especially if I am leaving things at stock settings as it will either work or it won't.

If I do run stress tests on an overclocked system I generally leave things running for a minimum of 1 hour and usually up to a maximum of 8 hours depending on what I am looking for.

When testing Memory, using MemTest I let it take as long as it takes to run through at least 8 complete passes for each module or kit I am testing.

[Arith]

Cheers Absic; I have run prime95 30 tests for 1 hour 6 minutes without error; so I suppose that is about it. Nothing to gain by underclocking plus it looks awfully difficult with the variable voltage. Actually most of the time or 99% of the time the pc will be running on idle, only short bursts needed for photo's about 100 times a week in summer, and idle is only 14 watts anyway.

[absic]

Don't be unduly worried about the variances in the CPU Voltage as this is part of the design of these 9 series motherboards. I have been running the GA-990FXA-UD5 with a Phenom ii 1090T and, at first, I too was surprised by this feature but I have been assured by both Gigabyte and AMD that it is normal and I have to say that it has never caused me any major problems.

The only time it has presented any difficulties is when it came to overclocking but, once again, this is due to the fact that I felt uncomfortable having to raise the CPU VCore higher than I had to on an 8 series board, to allow for the VDroop.

[Dark Mantis]

Everybody has their own standard for when they believe that a system is stable. I agree with absic and tend not to run any specific tests for a newly built system.  As long as it will perform as I want it to and will run all the software that I use then that's fine. Sometimes I will give it a brief series of tests like Prime95 and Vantage etc along with runnings some games. If all these perform ok that is good enough for me. THe only time I actually run specific test programs is when I am reviewing a component and want certain criterior to be able to show to the readers. Then I try to pick the most commonly used and current programs for this.

[Arith]

Cheers Dark Mantis; I can now concentrate getting software to work, I already have most of it installed.